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tipping points
Actuaries and Scientists Warn Climate Shocks Risk 'Planetary Insolvency'
A new report "shows a 50% GDP contraction between 2070 and 2090 unless an alternative course is chartered," said the lead author.
Jan 16, 2025
U.K. actuaries and University of Exeter climate scientists on Thursday warned that "the risk of planetary insolvency looms unless we act decisively" and urged policymakers to "implement realistic and effective approaches to global risk management."
Actuaries have developed techniques that "underpin the functioning of the global pension market with $55 trillion of assets, and the global insurance market, collecting $8 trillion of premiums annually, to help us manage risk," Tim Lenton, University of Exeter's climate change and Earth system science chair, noted in the foreword of a report released Thursday.
Planetary Solvency—Finding Our Balance With Nature is the fourth report for which the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) has collaborated with climate scientists. In financial terms, solvency is the ability of people or companies to pay their long-term debts. Co-authors of one of the previous publications coined the phrase planetary solvency, "setting out the idea that financial risk management techniques could be adapted to help society manage climate change and other risks."
Three IFoA leaders—Kalpana Shah, Paul Sweeting, and Kartina Tahir Thomson—explained in their introduction to the latest report how "planetary solvency applies these techniques to the Earth system," writing:
The essentials that support our society and economy all flow from the Earth system, commodities such as food, water, energy, and raw materials. The Earth system regulates the climate and provides a breathable atmosphere, it is the foundation that underpins our society and economy. Planetary solvency assesses the Earth system's ability to continue supporting us, informed by planetary boundaries, tipping points in the Earth system, and other scientific discoveries to assess risks to this foundation—and thus to our society and the economy.
Our illustrative assessment of planetary solvency in this report shows a more fundamental, policy-led change of direction is required. Our current market-led approach to mitigating climate and nature risks is not delivering. There is an increasing risk of severe societal disruption (planetary insolvency), as our economic system drives further global warming and nature degradation.
"Impacts are already severe with unprecedented fires, floods, heatwaves, storms, and droughts," the document points out, emphasizing that human activity—particularly burning fossil fuels—drives climate change and biodiversity loss. "If unchecked they could become catastrophic, including loss of capacity to grow major staple crops, multimeter sea-level rise, altered climate patterns, and a further acceleration of global warming."
The report was released as wildfires ravage California and shortly after scientific bodies around the world concluded that 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first in which the average global temperature exceeded a key goal of the Paris agreement: 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. In the United States, experts identified 27 disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion.
"We risk triggering tipping points such as Greenland ice sheet melt, coral reef loss, Amazon forest dieback, and major ocean current disruption," the new publication warns, adding that "tipping points can trigger each other," and if multiple are triggered, "there may be a point of no return, after which it may be impossible to stabilize the climate."
Food system shocks and more frequent and devastating disasters increase the risk of mass mortality for humanity—including due to hunger and infectious diseases—along with mass migration and conflict, the report highlights.
"Climate change risk assessment methodologies understate economic impact, as they often exclude many of the most severe risks that are expected and do not recognize there is a risk of ruin," the document stresses. "They are precisely wrong, rather than being roughly right."
Specifically, lead author and IFoA council member Sandy Trust said in a statement, "widely used but deeply flawed assessments of the economic impact of climate change show a negligible impact" on gross domestic product (GDP).
However, Trust continued, "the risk-led methodology, set out in the report, shows a 50% GDP contraction between 2070 and 2090 unless an alternative course is chartered."
To mitigate the risk of planetary insolvency, the co-authors called on policymakers around the world to implement independent, annual assessments; set limits and thresholds that respect the planet's boundaries; enhance governance structures to support planetary solvency; and "enhance policymaker understanding of ecological interdependencies, tipping points, and systemic risks so they understand why these changes are needed."
They also underscored the need to limit global warming and avoid triggering tipping points with actions such as accelerating decarbonization, removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, restoring damaged ecosystems, and building resilience.
"You can't have an economy without a society, and a society needs somewhere to live," said Trust. "Nature is our foundation... Threats to the stability of this foundation are risks to future human prosperity which we must take action to avoid."
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Antarctic Tipping Point That Occurred 8,000 Years Ago 'Could Happen Again'
"We now have direct evidence that this ice sheet suffered rapid ice loss in the past," said a Cambridge researcher.
Feb 09, 2024
As European Union scientists confirmed that last month continued a worrying trend of historically high temperatures, U.K. researchers released a study Thursday warning how fossil fuel-driven global heating could lead to catastrophic and rapid ice loss in Antarctica not seen for thousands of years.
The study, published by researchers at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the University of Cambridge in Nature Geoscience, relies on an ice core from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that is over 2,100 feet long.
"We now have direct evidence that this ice sheet suffered rapid ice loss in the past," said senior author and Cambridge Earth sciences professor Eric Wolff in a statement. "This scenario isn't something that exists only in our model predictions and it could happen again if parts of this ice sheet become unstable."
"The very same processes we are seeing just beginning now, in areas like Thwaites Glacier, have played out before in similar areas of Antarctica and indeed, the pace of ice loss was equal to our worst fears about a runaway ice loss."
Study co-author and BAS researcher Isobel Rowell explained that "we wanted to know what happened to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet at the end of the Last Ice Age, when temperatures on Earth were rising, albeit at a slower rate than current anthropogenic warming."
"Using ice cores we can go back to that time and estimate the ice sheet's thickness and extent," she continued. The team measured stable water isotopes and the pressure of air bubbles in the core, and found that the ice sheet "shrank suddenly and dramatically" about 8,000 years ago.
"We already knew from models that the ice thinned around this time, but the date of this was uncertain," Rowell noted, referencing estimates of 5,000-12,000 years ago. "We now have a very precisely dated observation of that retreat that can be built into improved models."
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is vulnerable because lots of it is on bedrock that's below sea level.\n\nIt looks like warm ocean water getting underneath triggered melting 8,000 years ago, before it stabilised at today's size.\n\nHuman-induced warming could restart the retreat.\n\n\ud83e\uddf53/3— (@)
Previous models also didn't indicate how quickly the retreat happened. However, the team's measurements showed that "once the ice thinned, it shrunk really fast," said Wolff.
"This was clearly a tipping point—a runaway process," he added. "It's now crucial to find out whether extra warmth could destabilize the ice and cause it to start retreating again."
University of Colorado Boulder glaciologist Ted Scambos was not involved with the study, but he called it "an excellent piece of detective work" and toldCNN that its takeaway message is "the amount of ice stored in Antarctica can change very quickly—at a pace that would be hard to deal with for many coastal cities."
CNN pointed out that the study contributes to mounting warnings from scientists about conditions in Antarctica:
For example, the Thwaites Glacier, also in West Antarctica, is melting rapidly. A 2022 study said the Thwaites—dubbed the Doomsday Glacier for the catastrophic impact its collapse would have on sea-level rise—was hanging on "by its fingernails" as the planet warms.
This new study adds to these concerns, Scambos said. "[It] shows that the very same processes we are seeing just beginning now, in areas like Thwaites Glacier, have played out before in similar areas of Antarctica and indeed, the pace of ice loss was equal to our worst fears about a runaway ice loss."
As Common Dreamsreported in October, a study published in Nature Climate Change found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—which contains enough ice to increase the global mean sea level by over 17 feet—faces an "unavoidable" increase in melting for the rest of this century.
"If we wanted to preserve it in its historical state, we would have needed action on climate change decades ago," lead author and BAS researcher Kaitlin Naughten said at the time—while also stressing that "we must not stop working to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels."
The release of that study preceded the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai. After COP28 ended in December with a final agreement that did not explicitly endorse a global phaseout of fossil fuels, scientists called it a "tragedy for the planet."
Despite the heat that the United Arab Emirates caught for having a fossil fuel CEO lead the latest summit, COP29 host Azerbaijan plans to have an oil executive head the next one, scheduled for November. Azerbaijan also plans to boost its gas production by a third during the next decade.
The COP29 host is far from alone. Global Witness revealed last month that the oil and gas companies that signed a decarbonization pact at last year's conference plan to burn through around 62% of the world's carbon budget by 2050—which sparked fresh demands for governments to stop caving to polluters and implement more ambitious climate policies.
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Scientists Say Risk of 5 Climate Tipping Points Means 'Business as Usual Is Now Over'
"Averting this crisis—and doing so equitably—must be the core goal of COP28 and ongoing global cooperation," one expert said.
Dec 06, 2023
An earlier version of this article said the sea levels could rise by 656 feet by 2100 if the Antarctic ice sheet started to melt. It has been corrected to reflect the fact that they would rise by 6.6 feet.
Current levels of global heating from the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of nature risk triggering five tipping points that could throw Earth's systems further out of balance, with three more at risk of toppling in the next decade.
The Global Tipping Points Report, released Wednesday at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in the United Arab Emirates, argues that policymakers have delayed climate action long enough that "linear incremental change" will no longer be enough to protect ecosystems and communities from the worst impacts of the climate crisis. However, world leaders can still choose to take advantage of positive tipping points to drive transformative change.
"The existence of tipping points means that 'business as usual' is now over," the report authors wrote. "Rapid changes to nature and society are occurring, and more are coming."
"Crossing these thresholds may trigger fundamental and sometimes abrupt changes that could irreversibly determine the fate of essential parts of our Earth system for the coming hundreds or thousands of years."
The report defines a "tipping point" as "occurring when change in part of a system becomes self-perpetuating beyond a threshold, leading to substantial, widespread, frequently abrupt and often irreversible impact." A group of more than 200 researchers assessed 26 different potential tipping points in Earth's systems that could be triggered by the climate crisis.
"Tipping points in the Earth system pose threats of a magnitude never faced by humanity," report leader Tim Lenton of Exeter's Global Systems Institute said in a statement. "They can trigger devastating domino effects, including the loss of whole ecosystems and capacity to grow staple crops, with societal impacts including mass displacement, political instability, and financial collapse."
Because current emissions trajectories put the world on track for 1.5°C of warming, this is likely to trigger five tipping points, the report authors found. Those tipping points are the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the mass die-off of warm-water coral reefs, the thawing of Arctic permafrost, and the collapse of the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre circulation.
The melting of just the Antarctic ice sheet, for example, could raise global sea levels by 6.6 feet by 2100, Carbon Brief reported, meaning 480 million people would face yearly coastal flooding. Three more tipping points could be triggered in the 2030s if temperatures rise past 1.5°C. These include the mass death of seagrass meadows, mangroves, and boreal forests, according to The Guardian.
"Crossing these thresholds may trigger fundamental and sometimes abrupt changes that could irreversibly determine the fate of essential parts of our Earth system for the coming hundreds or thousands of years," co-author Sina Loriani of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research told The Guardian.
Contributor Manjana Milkoreit of the University of Oslo said in a statement that "our global governance system is inadequate to deal with the coming threats and implement the solutions urgently required."
But that doesn't mean the report authors believe that hope is lost. Rather, they see it as a call to ambitious action at the current U.N. climate talks and beyond.
"Averting this crisis—and doing so equitably—must be the core goal of COP28 and ongoing global cooperation," Milkoreit said.
One way to do this is to take advantage of positive tipping points.
"Concerted actions can create the enabling conditions for triggering rapid and large-scale transformation," the report authors wrote. "Human history is flush with examples of abrupt social and technological change. Recent examples include the exponential increases in renewable electricity, the global reach of environmental justice movements, and the accelerating rollout of electric vehicles."
The report authors made six recommendations based on their findings:
- Immediately phasing out fossil fuels and emissions from land use changes like deforestation;
- Strengthening plans for adaptation and loss and damage in the face of inevitable tipping points;
- Taking tipping points into account in Paris agreement mechanisms like the global stocktake and national climate pledges;
- Collaborating to trigger positive tipping points;
- Organizing a global summit on tipping points; and
- Increasing research on tipping points, including through a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"Now is the moment to unleash a cascade of positive tipping points to ensure a safe, just, and sustainable future for humanity," Lenton said.
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